7038634357: Ariad

7038634357 presents Ariad, a suite of new work for multichannel audio. Ariad is a spare yet melodic composition, built from sine waves and white noise that employs a mobile speaker on an orbital track, at once destabilizing the fixed listening experience while invoking the artist's love of cyclical organization. This performance comes on the heels of their recent commission Rope, composed for the Acousmonium, the eighty speaker symphonic sound system designed by Francois Bayle for the Ina GRM–Groupe de Recherches Musicales in Paris.

Neo Gibson, born in Virginia and based in New York City, records, performs, and produces as 7038634357. This numerical alias, under which Gibson has been releasing since 2016, offers a window into the careful ambivalences of the musical project. It conjures the impersonal—the opacity and randomness of data, a number that is hard to remember or even say out loud—while also suggesting a direct line of communication with the artist, down to an area code indexing their biography.

7038634357 uses a restricted palette to achieve music that is formally precise and emotionally direct. Their digital-native approach to production, in which frank melodies cross paths with heavy distortion, contains traces of both trance’s maximalist arcs and a songwriterly intimacy. Such expressive details may appear submerged or abraded, subjected to a canny sense of dynamics and textural specificity.

Across recordings and performances, Gibson activates wide-ranging mechanisms of audience connection: from the relative anonymity of internet platforms to live experiments with the spatial effects of amplification. They have a particular interest in site-specific performances in non-musical spaces, and have performed in a variety of contexts, including the mezzanine of the West 4th Street subway station in New York City and INA GRM/Radio France’s Présences électronique festival. Under their own name, Gibson has maintained a longstanding collaboration with the artist Charles Stobbs, working primarily with FM transmission and techniques derived from the early-seventeenth-century English tradition of change-ringing bells.

The first 7038634357 vinyl record, Neo Seven, was released on Blank Forms Editions in 2023; previous releases include self-released cassettes and CD-Rs, and a pair of EPs on Genome 6.66 Mbp.